Chapter Sixteen #2
“Lonely types never do,” Flo said sagely. “Like Mom here. She seems perfectly normal, don’t you think? But she’s not. She’s actually a very lonely person.”
“Flo!” I felt myself turning bright red.
“What! You are.” Flo leaned into Gary. “She is,” she whispered, in the same carrying voice.
I stood there in shock. She thought I was lonely?
“Well, now, I think everyone has their lonely times,” Elton said quietly, pausing from peeling his apples. He gave me a kind look and I blushed even harder. Great. Now everyone thought I was weird and lonely.
“After Sylvie left me, I thought I’d just about die of loneliness,” Elton sighed.
“Your wife left you?” Flo turned away from her lesson on how to make pastry and gave Elton her full attention.
He smiled at her. “Not in the way you’re thinking. She got early-onset dementia. It started with a little memory loss, but she was in her forties, so she thought it was just the Change.”
“The Change?” Flo perked up and I knew she’d be thinking of werewolves or shapeshifters.
“Perimenopause,” I told her.
“What’s that?”
“A conversation for a whole other day.” We both turned back to Elton.
“First my Sylvie forgot how to tell time. And she was different, angrier. By the time she was fifty, she wasn’t herself anymore. She withdrew, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t quite recognize people. Even me.”
“Wow, that sucks,” Flo said, sitting down next to him.
“Yes, it really does.”
“What was she like before she lost it?”
“Flo!” I really needed to teach her some manners, I thought, my ears burning. “Before she got sick,” I corrected.
“No, it’s okay,” Elton said, and he was smothering a smile. “It’s an apt description.”
No, it’s not, I mouthed at Flo. She rolled her eyes.
He resumed his peeling. “And to answer your question, Sylvie was pure sunshine, Flo.”
“Yes, she was,” Gary Laughton agreed heartily. “Now, Flo, watch this part. Most people use a food processor for this, but an old-fashioned pie needs to be made the old-fashioned way.”
Reluctantly, Flo left Elton’s side and went to watch Gary rub butter and flour together through his fingers.
“I remember the summer Sylvie brought you to Oxeye, Elton,” Gary said with a puttering little laugh. “You were so smitten, she could have told you to jump off the cliffs and you would have.”
“I sure would have. And I would have died a happy man doing it.”
I listened to the two of them reminisce as they taught Florence how to bake a pie. They painted a picture of a cheerful, optimistic girl who liked pink roses and going to the movies, Elvis Presley and summers by the sea.
“She was happy with a simple life, was Sylvie,” Elton said, his voice warm.
“And it was so heartbreaking that it happened to her after she’d watched it take her Aunt Lori.
” He shook his head. “They were so close. They understood each other. In a family of big personalities, they were the quiet ones. It was hard on Sylvie, watching Lorraine suffer, and it must have crossed her mind that she had the same thing. I hate the thought of it. Her knowing—” His voice cracked, and he stopped talking.
“What a life she had, though, eh?” Gary said gently. “Summers here her whole life long, even till the end, with all her favorite people around her. She wasn’t one for apple pie, though, was she? Lemon chiffon, from memory.”
“No, that was Marly,” Elton corrected softly. “Sylvie loved apple pie—she always made me cover the trees so the birds wouldn’t eat the apples, and we came back during leaf peeping season to harvest them every year.”
“And now here we are, still harvesting them,” Flo marveled, her eyes glued to Gary, who was dripping vinegary water into the bowl of floury butter. “And still making apple pie.”
“Here we are,” Elton agreed. “That’s the way this life works. There are always apples to harvest.”
“Except on our trees,” Flo told him. “The birds ate almost all of our crabapples.”
“Next year I’ll loan you a net.”
Next year. Elton’s words cast a spell, and suddenly I could see us through a dozen flickering falls, harvesting apples and making pies, falling into a homely, enduring pattern, just like Elton and his wife. It made me feel warmed through.
While the pie crust fired in the oven, Flo went to check on her kittens. They had a bed now and a litter tray, and a bunch of toys Flo had found around the house—balls and bits of yarn.
“You’ve got a cat count?” Gary said as he noticed the chalkboard Flo had propped up on the counter.
“Both real and porcelain now,” I said with a sigh. We were at thirty-nine cat figurines and seven and a half actual cats. The half was Debussy, who didn’t technically live with us but was around enough to count for something.
Today he came in through the back door with Doris and Jake, who were carrying pumpkins and a couple of bottles of wine. Debussy went straight to the rag rug in front of the cold range and set himself to bathing.
“I thought Flo might like to make jack-o’-lanterns,” Doris huffed, dropping her pumpkin on the table.
“Smells good in here,” Jake said, as he put his pumpkin down too.
“Apple pie is a home smell,” Gary told me with a wink, as he gave Doris a wet kiss.
“What was that for?” she asked suspiciously.
“We were talking about Sylvie,” Elton explained. “It’s made him appreciate you more.”
“Ah, Sylvie.” Doris made a sad face. “I miss her. Who else would talk celebrity gossip with me? This one here”—she patted Gary’s round belly—“doesn’t even know what a Kardashian is.”
“I know what a Kardashian is,” Gary scoffed. “One of them broke the internet with her butt. You’d have to be dead to have missed that.”
“Gary! There’s a child present,” Doris scolded him.
“Sorry, Flo.”
“That’s okay, I wasn’t listening. I was trying to teach Cheeseball how to stand up on his hind legs. Velveeta can do it, so I told him he can do it too.”
Jake let out a long-suffering sigh at the kittens’ ignominious names.
“I hope no one minds a pizza delivery for dinner,” I apologized to them all. I only had the counter oven, and it was full of pie.